In the US, 53% of Americans are concerned about AI’s impact on the environment — TIME
In the United States, 53% of Americans said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence on the environment. This is 12 percentage points higher than last year, when 41% of respondents expressed such concern, TIME reports, citing a survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute.
A high level of concern about AI’s environmental consequences was recorded across all political groups: 65% of Democrats, 42% of Republicans, and 49% of independents said so. About six in ten Americans also said they would support limiting the number of new data centers that can be built.
Electricity and water
According to the survey, 60% of respondents are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of data centers on electricity prices or water supplies in the communities where they are built. About two-thirds of US adults support requiring data centers to use clean energy sources, including wind or solar power generation.
About eight in ten Democrats and 56% of Republicans support such a requirement. At the same time, only about a quarter of respondents called data centers very or extremely useful for technological development, while about two in ten said the same regarding job creation.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Data center expansion
According to Clearview, 1,287 data centers are operating in the United States, while more than 2,000 additional projects are planned. The largest number of such facilities operate in Virginia and Texas, while new projects are also planned in rural areas of the South and Midwest.
The growth is linked to the development of hyperscale data centers, which are larger and more powerful and are used to train and operate large AI models. According to an estimate by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, data centers could account for 11.8% of US electricity consumption by 2030.
As reported by the Urban Institute, as of September 2026, 313 moratoriums on data center development had been introduced in the country. They affected 44 states and more than 200 cities, counties, and other local communities.
